Hi Chrono,
Even though it looks as if you are inching your way forward in answering your question “what is at stake” you gather the experiential answer each time you pose this question. And because you have followed your common sense that committing “to feeling good come what may” makes perfect sense, to abandon everything that stands in the way of feeling good also makes perfect sense.
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Vineeto: And you also reported that when “some closeness starts to happen”, often a ‘good’ feeling, in this case “nostalgia” swoops in and diverts you from further exploring this “closeness”. It is exactly this fine-tuned attentiveness which allows you to detect such diversions sooner rather than later, before they gather solidity, and then get back to your original exploration.
Chrono: I’ve noticed it more and more in action and have been easily able to get back on track. In committing to feeling good right now, I am also willing to give up all of ‘my’ dreams. And any occurrence of nostalgia or some such bittersweet feelings is a hope for that feeling good somewhere and somewhen else. I can see the seductive nature of this chimera.
It’s a pleasure to read of your success – and all because your promise to yourself borne of common sense “to feeling good come what may”. Then everything else is of less importance and willingly given up.
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Vineeto: Lastly, when you say “sustained by the feeling of being trapped” you are probably aware that you are trapping yourself and ‘I’ am playing a trick on ‘me’ pretending the trapping is happening by someone else.
Chrono: The feeling of being trapped seems to be from not actively endorsing to being alive right now. It’s a sort of “holding back”. And the moment I actively endorse to being alive, the feeling good becomes more dynamic and more sensuous.
Exactly. Feeling being trapped is the passive approach, stemming from convinced that things in life happen to you as the hapless non-involved victim, mostly borne of the resentment of being here, as in “life is the pits and then you die”. Once you “actively endorse” being alive you are deliberately and joyously participate being alive and able to evoke your destiny. As it turns out you contemplated that very subject in your next paragraph.
Chrono: It also showed why I do feel trapped. I secretly believe that I can escape death. It sounds odd to say but from ‘my’ perspective it feels like that to unreservedly say yes to being alive right now is also to embrace death. This way I am enjoying AND appreciating being alive.
Do I understand you correctly – that you feel trapped because, even though you “secretly believe” you can escape death, you also know “that to unreservedly say yes to being alive right now” you need to abandon this secret belief and instead embrace the fact that you are mortal?
Above you wrote “I am willing to give up all of ‘my’ dreams” – is one of the dreams being able to “escape death”? The spiritual dream of immortality via an Altered State of Consciousness?
If that is what you are saying you have certainly hit the nail of the head – coming down to earth from lofty heights, embracing the very physicality of being alive, and as such also your mortality, is how you are able “to unreservedly say yes to being alive right now”.
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Vineeto: You have no need to “imagine it” – from the experience you described when “not being ‘me’” there were no concerns of being a “sociopath”, were there? As such you know as an experiential fact that minimising both ‘good’ and bad feelings, i.e. minimising ‘me’, is outside the range of sane and insane, it is being salubrious. This fact answers your question directly – “to abandon both” you become more and more salubrious.
Chrono: Yes this experience is my current benchmark that I’ve been utilizing. Where there is nothing to “keep in check”. So there’s no need for control and that perhaps is hard to digest. That ‘I’ am not needed.
Indeed. It may take some time to accept and get used to this fact ‘I’ am redundant.
Chrono: I was reading these questions and answers from Dona and Alan and there Geoffrey asks:
Geoffrey: Is this the ‘indirect’ connection between the commitment to feeling good and actual freedom: that this commitment to be honoured requires the examination of beliefs, that this examination constitutes a ‘whittling away’ at the identity, and that this ‘whittling away’, making the identity ‘insubstantial’, opens the possibility of self-immolation?
Dona: Richard got what you’re saying, but still says that you feel good because it feels good. There is no connection (direct or indirect) with feeling good and becoming actually Free.
Whittling away at beliefs does make the social identity “smaller”, but does NOT get rid of (or lessen) feelings. It might eliminate some of the “triggers”, but not the feelings themselves. Only becoming Actually Free does that. (link)
I am following the same train of thought that he is asking but it doesn’t seem like it was quite answered. I get the impression based on those answers that even a person feeling bad could just become actually free. Are those answers correct? Or perhaps a person that is feeling good is more likely to make the decision to become free? With that said, it does certainly make sense to feel good irregardless.
The next paragraph from Alan might be illuminating –
Alan: LOL. They both thought you are still trying to over complicate things. Instead of a direct connection you are now trying to find an indirect connection. There is no connection – direct or indirect. As has been reported above it is the ‘social identity’ which can be rendered less substantial, by the investigation and elimination of (mainly) beliefs and especially any ‘Truths’. (link)
And here is why there cannot ever be a connection, direct or indirect or implied –
Richard: Okay … this is important, vital, pivotal: ‘I’, the thinker, know that ‘I’ cannot do it … ‘I’ cannot disappear ‘myself’. Only the ‘utter fullness’ can, and the ‘utter fullness’ is ‘calling one’, each moment again, and it is only when ‘I’ fully comprehend – totally, completely, fundamentally – that to be living this ‘utter fullness’ is to be living ‘my’ destiny will one be able ‘to answer that call’. (> > Richard, List B, No 25f, 18 June 2000).
If there were a connection, then ‘I’ would not have to die. To put it differently – ‘my’ logical thinking to get from ‘here’ to ‘there’ (or rather from ‘there’ to here) cannot conceive “that ‘I’ cannot do it” and that ‘I’ have to disappear for the actual world to become apparent. In fact it is impossible for ‘me’, by ‘my’ very nature, to conceive that ‘I’ will ever disappear. It can only be understood experientially in a PCE or moments of apperception – and then it is perfectly obvious.
Chrono: Also very funny as I am asking in that correspondence that many years ago and expressing the same fears of going insane. Looks like I am exactly the same step away as I was then. Well, aside from feeling way better than I was then. But I am stunned at how long it has been.
Ha, can you see how you are depreciating the fact that you are “feeling way better than I was then” as in putting it to one side (“aside from”) while berating yourself “how long it has been”?
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Vineeto: You have no need to “imagine it” – from the experience you described when “not being ‘me’” there were no concerns of being a “sociopath”, were there? As such you know as an experiential fact that minimising both ‘good’ and bad feelings, i.e. minimising ‘me’, is outside the range of sane and insane, it is being salubrious. This fact answers your question directly – “to abandon both” you become more and more salubrious.
Chrono: There were no concerns then. I realize that it seems like a long leap from here to there because of my loyalty to Humanity.
You may find this informative –
Richard: […] The peculiar aspect of this ‘disguised slavery’ system is, then, the vacuity of the peasant-mentality which dumbly perpetuates it.
In a nutshell: what the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body circa 1978-79 began calling a ‘peasant mentality’ was exemplified by that vast majority of peoples not only just dumbly accepting and perpetuating this undeniably-rigged socio-economic system (known to hipsters as ‘The Establishment’) as being ‘just the way it is’ but being fiercely loyal to it, into the bargain, and defensive of it amongst themselves (to the point of defending it unto death, even, in shooting wars against other peasants similarly defending their elite few).
I kid you not; on many an occasion back then, when that identity would share ‘his’ insights with ‘his’ fellow-peasants, they would object most strenuously – especially the salaried peasants (those ‘white-collar workers’ who fondly imagined themselves to be a cut above peasant-hood) – and would vigorously defend the status-quo in a manner not all that dissimilar to what is known in psychological/ psychiatric terms as ‘capture-bonding’ (popularly known as ‘The Stockholm Syndrome’, when localised, and ‘The Oslo Syndrome’, when communalised).
Interestingly enough, some symptoms of ‘capture-bonding’ have been identified, in regards to criminal hostage situations, prisoners of war/ concentration camp internees, controlling/ intimidating relationships (battered wives/ hen-pecked husbands/ abused children), cult members, incest victims, and the like, […]
The hallmark of ‘peasant-mentality’ is, in a word, loyalty. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List D, Claudiu3, 28 May 2015).
Hence your “loyalty to Humanity” has various aspects of the social identity/ peasant mentality, which you can each recognize, understand and abandon whenever they stand in the way of enjoying and appreciating being here.
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Vineeto: For a feeling being all caring is accompanied by feelings, so a useful discernment would be to be less guided by what others expect you to do, or you yourself feel obligated to do, according to traditional beliefs and concepts, but instead be harmless, considerate and benevolent (…)
This underlying atavistic fear of “I will go insane and simultaneously lose all connection to Humanity” is universal, only varying in strength and expression. Those cast out from the tribe could not survive on their own. I remember ‘Vineeto’ once had strong fears of being condemned/ burnt as a witch if anyone found out what a traitor to the human condition ‘she’ was.
Chrono: In keeping with seeing what is at stake, I see the nature of ‘my’ connection to Humanity is composed of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. I was speaking with my dad again yesterday and the conversation veered toward human nature. He was of the opinion that you cannot change human nature and that to do so would ensure that you could not function in society (citing the corporate politics that he has to play in his job). But he also agreed that “the bombs dropping” was sanity in action and that there can never be any solution. He seemed to intuitively understand what the nature of what I was saying was as he said if I were to become free from human nature then I would be found out and be tortured. It really felt like I was talking to the embodiment of Humanity. Subsequently, I was very appalled. I realized that there was no saving Humanity. Humanity wants to remain as it is and maintain the status quo. And by remaining a denizen, I am also one of its embodiments.
I understand you were appalled by realizing how remaining a “denizen” you are actively supporting ‘Humanity’, and it is no wonder ‘I’ come up with the most potent and threatening counter-argument to leaving humanity – that you will go insane. But as you more and more realise, the alternative to sanity is not insanity but the salubriousness of being less and less of ‘me’, in other words, being felicitous and innocuous and appreciative of being alive. When you understand this, then chipping away at your loyalty to humanity is no longer such a scary big deal.
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Vineeto: And isn’t it a wonderful relief and joy when one portion of the inner push-and-pull battle has disappeared completely?
Chrono: Yes, becoming aware of what is actually happening underneath has been an enormous help in declining these battles. Before I didn’t understand exactly what was happening so it would amount to suppressing or pretending. (link)
Above you said “I am stunned at how long it has been” – to thoroughly and experientially understand how the human psyche works is a gradual process, and you are daily reaping the rewards.
Cheers Vineeto